With the second of the Ideation Pod’s three months behind us, it’s time for another recap. As a reminder, we had four ideations, with the Funding Guild and CoDwell making their debut while Cabin Crafted (ex-Cabin Productions) and Social Scraping came back for their second month.
General Observations
As seen from the lack of volunteers to work on ideations in the first two months and the general lack of engagement with the reporting of the first month in contrast to the wide and active support for the Ideation Pod leading up to its launch, the stewards once again ended up being involved as primary active team members in nearly every ideation (except CoDwell). As such, the Pod has emerged as a good playground for the ideators (either as stewards or team leads) but needs to find ways to attract more Cabiners who see the ideas, love them, and actively join in.
The above puts a heavy burden on the stewards. For example, @Dahveed was actively participating in two ideations, advising on a third, reporting on all of them, and lining up new ones for Month 3. (This month, due to other workloads, only Dahveed and @Kat were able to actively steward the Pod.)
All this to say that your involvement and public support means a lot. If any of the incoming ideations speak to you, please get involved! If you found any of the past, present, or future ideations interesting, please comment!
Ok, mini-rant over: let’s get into each ideation
Cabin Crafted
The Team
Katya (@Kat)
What Katya Set Out to Accomplish:
- Social Media Content: Whip up some posts with a distinct Cabin flair
- Merch Design: Cook up some designs… ideally ones that don’t get relegated to the “free event tee” drawer of doom
- Brand Experience Curation: Infuse Cabin’s DNA into every touchpoint, whether it’s a sticker slapped on a water bottle or a cheeky tagline on merch packaging
What She Ended Up Doing:
Social Media Content:
- Produced short-form content to help keep Cabin’s social presence active
- Experimented with different tones and storytelling approaches
Merch Design:
- Designed concept mockups for merch items with nature-inspired branding and urban streetwear flair
Brand Experience Curation:
- Conceptualized potential Cabin-themed packaging for merch.
Lessons Learned:
Authenticity Over Perfection: Playful, unpolished content often resonated more than highly curated posts. Authenticity drives more organic engagement.
What’s next:
Cabin Crafted will be writing up a proposal for a 3-month pilot — stay tuned!
- Refined Merch Launch: Move forward with a marketing campaign for the “Spring Collection” merch drop and also make the Shopify site a little more saucy
- Content Series: Create a mini-series highlighting creative Cabin members and their projects, blending storytelling with visually engaging content. Travel to meet Cabiners where they are and capture willing participants in their element. (Ideally 1 member a month)
An idea she’d like to explore further with the community:
- Brand Kits for Stewards: Develop a Cabin-branded experience kit for neighborhood stewards (stickers, postcards, welcome cards) to enhance the on-the-ground experience.
CoDwell
The Team
Sparr
The Idea
Turn a boarding school with many facilities into a large live/work/play intentional community.
What Sparr Set Out to Accomplish
The goals for the ideation month included:
- Making a list of facebook groups, twitter communities, subreddits, dreamwidth/livejournal groups, forums, mailing lists, etc that are relevant to the project, along with their posting and promotion rules.
- Making introductory posts in every appropriate such group
- Making a list of publicly posting users/accounts on those platforms who focus on topics relevant to the project.
- Leaving at least one topical comment in a high traffic thread by each such user.
- Making a list of triple-net/impact-focused lenders and investment organizations that could be useful in funding the project
- Initiating contact with ten such organizations.
What He Ended Up Doing
Sparr reached out to Facebook groups/pages receptive to the CoDwell concept, making it a habit to post daily. He also called every attorney in Oregon (about 70 firms) with a listing on Justia showing specialties for Tax and Real Estate. He had phone consults with two, and found one he’s likely to work with for the property purchase and incorporation and land use applications. They are referring him to someone to help the current owner with property tax concerns
Sparr started participating in the local (Laurelwood) community efforts to prevent residential development adjacent to the property, made good connections with some locals and the attorney for a local farmland nonprofit. This has promise both for getting support to use the school and for possibly acquiring the adjacent farmland eventually.
In addition to Sparr’s continuous progress in social media and legal help outreach, Katya, Dahveed, and Sparr had a brainstorming call where we found ways to make the work easier (esp. via social scraping — more on that later).
Lessons Learned
There is only so much that one person can do in one month. Yet, daily, persistent work pays off, and this was evident.
What’s next
On the practical side, more of the same work, plus automating a lot of it by applying Social Scraping. On the big-picture side, Sparr is exploring various investment options, including from Cabin in some capacity.
Funding Guild
The Team
The Idea
Finding and helping Cabin members get as many relevant grants as possible.
What they Set Out to Accomplish
In this 1-month trial, the goals were to:
- Catalog at least 20 grant sources, timelines, and application processes
- Start recruiting a team to help with searching, applying, and documenting grants
- For any grants received for Cabin as a whole, start designing ways to distribute them among various Cabin initiatives and neighborhoods.
What They Ended Up Doing
Dahveed catalogued grant databases, sources, and opportunities with an eye of what may be relevant to Cabin neighborhood stewards and other members.
Kaela and Dahveed had a call with a grant-writing (and winning) expert from Kaela’s community in order to learn, in part by applying for a local grant for the firehouse in Kaela’s community (applications just opened up).
Dahveed had a discussion with Maia that also touched on rural development grants, leading to some interesting ideas on which types of grants could be relevant to different neighborhood stewards.
Just like with CoDwell, Dahveed and JonBo are exploring how to apply the Social Scraping stack to the Funding Guild to help find hidden opportunities.
Speaking of opportunities, a serendipitous one came up to run a Gitcoin Grant round for neighborhood building infrastructure. Spearheaded by @jon (submitting the application just in time) and prepared with amazing speed and quality by @camlindsay. @savkruger, @jonbo, Grin, and Dahveed also spent the weekend brainstorming grant design for both the current and subsequent rounds.
The round is now live at:
Lessons Learned
Many grants go to established organizations and especially 501c3 ones. We need to better understand the needs of neighborhood stewards and which grants would actually be available to them.
What’s next
Continuing to fill out the grants database, applying Social Scraping API, and getting started on that local grant application. Though a more immediate focus is on soliciting quality applications for our Gitcoin Grants Round.
Social Scraping
The Team
Dahveed and JonBo
The Idea
Set up API to scrape Twitter for keywords and key accounts on Cabin-relevant topics. Put together squads with interest/expertise in each group of related keywords to insert Cabin into relevant Twitter conversations, thus increasing awareness and bringing new people into the community.
What Dahveed and JonBo Set Out to Accomplish
The goal for the 2nd month was to fine-tune the filters in order to make the results more manageable for the one person corresponding with them (Dahveed).
What They Ended Up Doing
Based on Dahveed’s documented emoji reactions to each tweet, JonBo ran the results through an LLM and created a more precise filtering model, including a “filtered” channel so we can study false-negatives. We also reduced the number of topics. Then, Dahveed kept interacting with the tweets to give us a larger dataset to analyze.
Lessons Learned
In the process, we realized that Social Scraping is a powerful tool for other ideations. So far, we could see it being used by Sparr for CoDwell, and by Dahveed for Funding Guild’s grant search.
What’s next
Making the API modular and easy for anyone to interact with, so it can be instantly applied to new ideations without having JonBo custom-design it for that specific search.
That’s it for Month 2. We’ll introduce Month 3 ideations shortly.
The Stewards
